History 1800 - 1886

1800

The Library of Congress was established as the fledgling legislature of the new Republic prepared to move from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress." The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library's first home. The collection consisted of 740 volumes and three maps.

1802

President Thomas Jefferson approved the first law defining the role and functions of the new institution. This measure created the post of Librarian of Congress and gave Congress, through a Joint Committee on the Library, the authority to establish the Library's budget and its rules and regulations. From the beginning, however, the institution was more than just a legislative library, for the 1802 law made the appointment of the Librarian of Congress a presidential responsibility. It also permitted the president and vice president to borrow books, a privilege that was extended to most government agencies and to the judiciary three decades later.

1814

The British army invaded the city of Washington and burned the Capitol, including the 3,000 volume Library of Congress. President Jefferson, who had retired at Monticello, offered to sell his personal library to the Congress to "recommence" the nations' library. The purchase of the largest and finest personal or public library in the country included 6,487 volumes, and was purchased from Jefferson in 1815 for $23,940.

The library that Jefferson sold to Congress not only included over twice the number of volumes that had been destroyed in the Library of Congress, but it expanded the scope of the Library far beyond the bounds of a legislative library devoted primarily to legal, economic, and historical works.

1832

The Law Library was established as a separate department of the Library of Congress; its collections included just over two thousand volumes, 639 of which had been part of Thomas Jefferson's library.

The photograph shows the space occupied by the Law Library when it was located in the Capital.

Now in the Madison Building, the Law Library holds over two million items, from the mundane to the magnificent -- including the Magna Carta, printed in gold letters with watercolor initials in London in 1816.

1851

The most serious fire in the Library's history destroyed about two-thirds of its fifty-five thousand volumes, including two-thirds of Jefferson's library. Congress responded quickly and generously: appropriating $168,700 to restore the Library's rooms in the Capitol and to replace the lost books.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the Library of Congress had begun distributing public documents to institutions throughout the United States and exchanging books and documents with foreign institutions on behalf of the U.S. government. Moreover, in 1859 all U.S. copyright activities were centralized at the Patent Office. This meant that the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution no longer received the copies of books and pamphlets deposited for copyright that had been sent to each institution since 1846.

1865

The person responsible for transforming the Library of Congress into an institution of national significance in the Jeffersonian spirit was Ainsworth Rand Spofford, a former Cincinnati bookseller and journalist who served as Librarian of Congress from 1865 until 1897. Spofford accomplished this task by permanently linking the legislative and national functions of the Library. He provided his successors as Librarian with four essential prerequisites for the development of an American national library: (1) firm, bipartisan congressional support for the notion of the Library of Congress as both a legislative and a national library, (2) the beginning of a comprehensive collection of Americana, (3) a magnificent new building, itself a national monument, and (4) a strong and independent office of Librarian of Congress.

In the first years of his administration Spofford obtained congressional approval of six laws or resolutions that ensured a national role for the Library of Congress. The legislative acts were: an appropriation providing for the expansion of the Library in the Capitol building, approved in early 1865, the copyright amendment of 1865, which once again brought copyright deposits into the Library's collection, the Smithsonian deposit of 1866, whereby the entire library of the Smithsonian Institution, a collection especially strong in scientific materials, was transferred to the Library, the international exchange resolution of 1867, providing for the development of the Library's collection of foreign public documents, and the copyright act of 1870, which brought all U.S. copyright registration and deposit activities to the Library.

The centralization of copyright activities at the Library was Spofford's most impressive collection-building feat. The first U.S. copyright law was approved in 1790, but the practice of depositing items registered for copyright protection in libraries for use was not enacted until 1846, when the newly established Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress obtained the privilege. The Library of Congress received single copies of deposits from 1846 until 1859 and, thanks to Spofford, the practice started again in 1865.

1870

The copyright law ensured the continuing development of the Library's Americana collections, for it stipulated that two copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, photograph, and piece of music registered for copyright be deposited in the Library, a requirement that certainly would have met with Jefferson's approval. The international copyright law of 1891, which gave protection to works of foreign origin under certain conditions of reciprocal protection added further luster to the Library for the first time.

1886

Authorization was given for a structure directly across the east plaza from the Capitol. Now called the Thomas Jefferson Building, this imposing structure in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with its grand Main Reading Room at the Center and exuberant interior decoration throughout, is an incomparable symbol of the universality of knowledge.

about us:

mission
history

work place
diversity